Dr. G.P. “Bud” Peterson

President Emeritus, Georgia Tech

Dr. G.P. “Bud” Peterson was the eleventh president of the Georgia Institute of Technology. In this capacity he oversaw a top ten public research university with more than 21,500 students and research expenditures of more than $730 million.

Throughout his career, Dr. Peterson has played an active role in helping to establish the national education and research agendas, serving on numerous industry, government, and academic task forces and committees. A distinguished scientist, Dr. Peterson was selected in 2008 by President George W. Bush to serve on the National Science Board through 2014.

Dr. Peterson was born September 1, 1952, in San Francisco, California, and earned undergraduate degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics as well as a Master’s degree in engineering from Kansas State University. He earned his doctoral degree in Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University.

Bill Nussey

Partner, Engage and Tech Square Ventures

Bill is a Partner at Engage and Tech Square Ventures. In this role, he will oversee the growth of the Engage program and fund.

Bill spent most of his career as a tech CEO. His first company, which he co-founded in high school, provided graphics software for early, text-based personal computers. His second company, Da Vinci Systems, was started out of his college dorm room and grew to serve millions of users across 45 countries. Later, he spent several years as a venture capitalist with Greylock. In 1998, he left the firm to become CEO of a portfolio company, iXL, which went public and grew to $500 million in revenue. After iXL, he joined Silverpop as CEO. The company grew to nearly $100 million in recurring revenue and became a global leader in cloud-based marketing. In 2014, IBM acquired the company and made it the foundation of the IBM Marketing Cloud. Shortly after the acquisition, Bill was promoted to IBM’s VP Corporate Strategy, helping the CEO and SVPs set IBM’s strategic roadmap. Bill’s companies have created thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in value.

Bill’s journey into clean energy began with a TED Talk, which grew into 100+ articles and, most recently, the #1 ranked renewable energy podcast called The Freeing Energy Podcast. All of this supported and ultimately led to his upcoming book called Freeing Energy.

Supported by 320 interviews across the world, the book’s mission is to help readers understand a powerful new approach to accelerating the shift to clean energy. The core ideas focus on decentralized (or local) energy, novel business models, and the inspiring people driving these changes.

In 2018, Bill co-founded Solar Inventions whose mission is to commercialize a set of scientific breakthroughs for improving silicon photovoltaics.

Bill received a degree in electrical engineering from North Carolina State University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He holds several patents, has published three books and sits on several commercial and non-profit boards. Bill and his family are involved in a handful of projects providing off-grid, resilient electricity in places like East Africa and Puerto Rico.

Igor Jablokov

CEO and Founder, Pryon

Igor is the CEO and Founder of Pryon. Named an “Industry Luminary” by Speech Technology Magazine, he previously founded industry pioneer Yap, the world’s first high-accuracy, fully-automated cloud platform for voice recognition. After its products were deployed by dozens of enterprises, the company became Amazon’s first AI-related acquisition. The firm’s inventions then served as the nucleus for follow-on products such as Alexa, Echo, and Fire TV. As a Program Director at IBM, Igor led the team that designed the precursor to Watson and developed the world’s first multimodal Web browser.

Igor was awarded Eisenhower and Truman National Security fellowships to explore and expand the role of entrepreneurship and venture capital in addressing geopolitical concerns. As an innovator in human language technologies, he believes in fostering career and educational opportunities for others entering STEM fields. As such, he serves as a mentor in the TechStars’ Alexa Accelerator, was a Blackstone NC Entrepreneur-In-Residence (EIR), and founded a chapter of the Global Shapers, a program of the World Economic Forum.

Igor holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University, where he was named an Outstanding Engineering Alumnus, and an MBA from The University of North Carolina.

Blake Patton

Managing Partner

Blake is the founder and Managing Partner of Tech Square Ventures. He currently represents Tech Square Ventures on the boards of Pointivo (Chairman) and PreTel Health (Chairman), as a board observer of Haste, and is the Managing General Partner of Engage. He was previously a board director and observer of Cypress.io (Chairman), Sequr (sold to Genea), UserIQ, and Salesfusion (sold to SugarCRM). Under his leadership, the firm has invested in 47 early-stage ventures.

Prior to founding Tech Square Ventures, Blake was General Manager of the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) at Georgia Tech – named by Forbes as one of the “Top 12 Incubators Changing the World”. Prior to leading ATDC, he served as President & COO of Interactive Advisory Software and EVP of iXL, an internet services company that he joined through the acquisition of Swan Media and was part of the executive team that grew the company from startup to over $300 million in annualized revenue and an IPO. He started his career as an Associate at SEI Corporation.

Blake is an active leader in the technology community, serving on the boards of Engage, the Center for American Entrepreneurship (former Chairman), Georgia Advanced Technology Ventures (GATV) and High Tech Ministries. He also serves on the advisory boards of ATDC and Georgia Tech’s Cowan-Turner Center for Servant Leadership. Blake is a former Chairman of Venture Atlanta, a Georgia Tech Alumni Association Trustee, a Georgia Research Alliance Industry Fellow and a member of the selection committee for the NC State Chancellor’s Innovation Fund.  Blake also teaches Entrepreneurial Finance at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business.

Blake earned a Bachelor of Industrial and Systems Engineering degree from Georgia Tech, where he was captain of the swim team. He was inducted into the Georgia Tech College of Engineering’s Council of Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni and previously served on the Georgia Tech Advisory Board.

Maddie Harper

Manager, Go-to-Market Program, Engage

Madeline “Maddie” Harper is the Manager of the Go-to-Market Program at Engage where she is responsible for operations and program support.

During her college career, Maddie was a Corporate Development and Sales Associate at Stackfolio, Inc for 3 years, a machine learning-enabled online marketplace for loan trading and participation. She worked with product, sales, and operations teams on projects encompassing corporate strategy, B2B sales, and internal operations.

Maddie has earn her B.S. in Business Administration in May 2021, with the highest honor, from the Georgia Institute of Technology where she specialized in Operations and Supply Chain Management with a certificate in Leadership and Organizational Change. She was actively involved in The Society of Women in Business and Ronald McDonald House Charities.

Taylor Schwan

Corporate Director

Taylor Schwan is the Director of Corporate Innovation at Engage and is responsible for building a world-class program that delivers accelerated innovation, learning, and networking opportunities to our partner companies and executives.

Prior to Engage, Taylor served in management consulting roles at Atlanta-based firm, GXG, and at Marriott International where she was a Senior Manager of Enterprise Strategy for the Global Loyalty Business. At Gartner, Taylor was a Senior Researcher supporting legal and compliance executives on corporate governance, data privacy, and compliance initiatives. During her time in DC, Taylor also had the privilege of running a non-profit called National Student Leadership, which focuses on equipping the next generation of student leaders through the idea of servant leadership.

Taylor is passionate about mentorship and innovation, at both a professional and personal level. She serves as a mentor for National Student Leadership and as a member of Women Shaping Shepherd, an Atlanta-based non-profit focused on funding patient-centered programs to fulfill Shepherd Center’s mission of helping people with temporary or permanent disabilities to rebuild their lives with hope, independence, and dignity.

Taylor is an Atlanta native and earned a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs and Political Science from the University of Georgia.

Call Simulator

Tallahassee, Florida

The Call Simulator Platform combines Conversational AI and Generative AI to replace traditional role-play training with a safe, scalable environment for agent training. Fully integrated with call center training software, Call Simulator uses streaming-speech-to-speech technology to provide agents with a realistic, immersive training experience. Call Simulator leverages Generative AI to easily create variability in the call content paired with thousands of “personas”. Every simulation performed within Call Simulator matters and is captured – enabling coaching, feedback, and scoring capabilities at scale.

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE

CIRT

Athens, Georgia

CIRT is the pitchbook for sustainable materials sourcing and recovery throughout the packaging value chain to end-of-life. The CIRT B2B platform is backed by the world’s first aggregation of watersheds, materials, and products. Companies create digital twins of their products and packaging in the CIRT Portal, which allows them to convey up-to-date, location-specific, and product-specific recovery information to customers at both a consumer and corporate level.

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE

Cloud Range

Nashville, Tennessee

Cloud Range exists to overcome the grave skills shortage in cybersecurity, which is also an experience shortage. Because of the ever-changing threat landscape, Security professionals are only as good as the experience they have, and a lack of experience equals vulnerabilities and risk. Cloud Range solves this by developing simulation exercises to accelerate people’s experience in order to ensure that they are prepared for forthcoming cyber attacks, which ultimately reduces cyber risk.

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE

Kim Technologies

Atlanta, Georgia

Kim is a no-code, patent-protected, Automation-as-a-Service platform that turns a company’s existing documents (letters, forms, checklists, compliance records, contracts ) into Standard Operating Procedures, driving Straight Through Processing. Kim helps knowledge workers whether they are in IT, HR, Legal, Compliance or any other function or role to (i) automate and generate documents, (ii) capture data and generate other documents, and/or (iii) use the data to populate other systems. Documents. Data. Integrations.

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE

LOLIWARE

San Jose, California

LOLIWARE® Inc. is an award-winning materials tech company focused on replacing single-use plastics with seaweed-derived alternatives that are Designed to Disappear®. As the first company worldwide to truly scale seaweed as a viable replacement for plastic, LOLIWARE’s innovative SEA Technology®, (Seaweed-derived, Emission-avoiding, Alternative to plastic) represents a new category of sustainable, regenerative resins derived from seaweed – a bio-renewable and carbon-capturing input. The first product launch in the category is the LOLIWARE® drinking straw. SEA Technology® resins are currently being applied to single-use items/packaging such as straws, cold cups, utensils, and films to advance our planet towards a plastic-free, decarbonized future.

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE

Pitstop

Toronto, Canada

Pitstop’s analytics provide actionable insights (predictive analytics) for fleets to understand, anticipate and resolve issues with vehicles. Their software saves significant money on maintenance as well as reduces downtime in fleets, by surfacing issues before they happen, and can help with larger decisions on fleet management (including acquisition and disposition).

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE

Sotero

Burlington, Massachusetts

Sotero is a global innovator and leader in next-generation data security. Sotero’s data security platform eliminates malware beyond ransomware, as well as insider threats with virtually no latency or impact on user experience. Patented technology secures data “in-use” and enables our customers to innovate and gain a competitive advantage while mapping back to regulatory compliance mandates.

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE

Therma

San Francisco, California

Therma is a clean cooling company. Using AI and IOT-enabled temperature, humidity, and equipment performance monitoring and control systems, Therma can lower energy usage as well as prevent asset downtime and product loss in commercial and industrial refrigeration (cold supply chains).

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE